Double Consciousness — A Slam by Nicole Masangkay and Erika Bleyl

December 14, 2013

Slam poetry can articulate and weave together so many of our deepest truths, anxieties, and memories. Listen to Nicole Masangkay and Erika Bleyl, two Seattle-based slam poets, speak their truths about being Asian American in this poem, “Double Consciousness.”

ERIKA BLEYL is a mixed queer spoken word poet from Yokohama, Japan. She is a graduate of the University of Washington, and went to the Collegiate National Poetry Slam Invitational 3 years consecutively – twice on the team, and once as coach.

TRANSCRIPT below.

**This transcript was taken directly from the video, so apologies for any errors in line breaks/wording.

Double Consciousness

[Two people stand on a stage. They recite animatedly into microphones.]

Sometimes identity feels like an open wound,

unmatched skins with jagged seams,

halves of partitions not easily brought together.

To just stand separately,

side by side,

is not healing.

Scars in union form in the shape of hyphens–

Japanese-American

Filipino-American

half-white–

two parts that seem to add to a whole,

as if a single identity comes before another,

as if one thing plus another tie seamlessly together

without complications.

What do you taste when you swallow your pride?

Authenticity, legacy, history, translation…

Translation is inevitably betrayal.

Does it all go down easy?

There are so many things I haven’t fully digested.

I lost words when I was growing up because I thought I wasn’t meant to learn them.

Growing up in Japan, passing as white,

I was only talked to in broken, accented English.

English is a language of privilege.

There is a history I fail to speak.

Am I American or lost at sea?
Who am I responsible for?

Who am I guilty for?

My parents are proud to never let work bruise my fingertips,

never fully letting the language of their work scripted tip of my American tongue.

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